May 18, 2008

LetsProve Debuts Open Two-Way Lifestream Platform, API

The lifestreaming market is a crowded one, with each new service differentiating itself through design, customizability, ability to enable conversations, or engage community. A new entrant to the space, called LetsProve, offers developers the ability to connect their own services to the site, and offers more than just a coagulation of friends activities, also enabling popular sites to update you within the feed, much like RSS.

One LetsProve feed of activity, prior to adding friends.(Note the updates from ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch)

There are a few interesting wrinkles to LetsProve on day one.

While it's not uncommon to offer updates to your feed from our own activity and that of your friends, some of the default applications you can add to your LetsProve feed are popular tech blogs, including TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, Engadget and VentureBeat. In theory, by adding these applications, you could stay in LetsProve and have the news come to you, rather than jumping to an external RSS feed reader, or waiting for a friend to share it in their Google Reader shared items.

Also, LetsProve offers syndication with your Twitter account, so that updates to your LetsProve feed can be posted as Direct Messages (DMs) directly to you.

I can customize my LetsProve feed.

Unlike many other lifestreaming services, LetsProve also offers an extremely customizable user interface. Users can do more than just select an avatar. They can pick a background image for their feed, or edit background, link and font colors, making the LetsProve stream unique to each individual.

Beyond the basic lifestreaming capabilities, LetsProve is also thinking ahead. At launch, LetsProve offers a platform which the site says "enables anyone to build applications that can update your activites from exeternal services, and send notifications." Think there are users on the site who would like to tap into your content? LetsProve has already developed an API in beta to make this happen. (See the Developers Page)

What LetsProve doesn't offer today is the kind of interactivity through comments and direct sharing to the feed common on other popular sites, but considering its early stage and humble beginnings, it could be quite interesting to watch. You can find my LetsProve blog at http://letsprove.com/louisgray.